Coop Norway – Interview with Martin Haneferd

Coop Norway has plans for major expansion in the SAP system area.

This at a time when most other companies seem to be moving new SAP positions to, supposedly, low cost countries or outsourcing them to third party suppliers. They are looking to fill 7 new IT roles in the SAP area, all based in Norway!

As part of an interview with Martin Haneferd – IT Departmental Leader in Coop Norway including SAP, it became clear that Coop Norway has major plans relating to the creative use of customer related data and its business application.

Coop predominantly runs SAP as its key business system, and the plans are to use key SAP technology and software to facilitate the planned changes.

The complexity of Coop Coop business deal with at least 220 000 different product variants and have several different business models, which poses a real time challenge for their IT systems. Coop produces mountains of data, which they consolidate into one system, SAP BW on HANA.

By introducing SAPs Customer Activity Repository (CAR) they can now gather and consolidate data from disparate sources and produce customer centric views to enable them to make key decisions based on real time data.

Martin Haneferd pointed out that the Coop is extremely interested in the adoption of innovative technology and solutions. Key areas they are looking at and working on are future forecasting solutions and automation throughout the whole supply chain. Use of business analytics, IoT and machine learning in warehouse management and transportation. The goal is to create the most efficient supply chain with innovative use of SAP HANA.

However, the real success is in the quality of the people they employ either as direct employees or as third party consultants. The emphasis is on recruiting highly competent people, providing the right kind of training and experience building opportunities, keeping staff motivated and creating a great working environment. In fact, Martin Haneferd pointed out that staff retention has never been a problem, which is impressive for an employer with more than 50 internal SAP staff here in Norway.

Clearly, a win-win situation for the Coop and career minded SAP professionals!